The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  Rosa Parks, Montgomery, Alabama, 1955. Photograph. Press Association Images. Recorded as a “negro seamstress,” Rosa Parks is fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff D. H. Lackey after her arrest for refusing to give up her seat for a white person.

  Inspired deeply by the teachings of Ella Baker and the educator and activist Septima Clark (1898–1987), Parks quietly but adamantly refused to relinquish her seat to a white man one day, knowing full well that she might be arrested. As Parks became an icon of quiet resistance, it was the resolve and resourcefulness of grassroots people—maids, workers, and housewives—that sustained a boycott of the city buses that lasted 381 days. For more than a year, Montgomery’s African American workers walked to work, carpooled, and endured shared inconvenience. With 75 percent of the ridership of Montgomery’s buses black, the economic threat to the city was serious.34 But the protest—both Parks’s individual one and the massive one that followed—posed an even graver threat to the city’s social order. Montgomery’s adherence to Jim Crow laws was harsh, even by the standards of the Deep South, and to have it upended was a humiliation to the city. Finally, the Supreme Court upheld a lower-court ruling declaring Montgomery’s segregated bus system unconstitutional. Ella Baker’s organizing principle—that “authentic” leadership had to be built from the bottom up—had achieved its aims.

  While the Montgomery bus boycott demonstrated the success of Baker’s grassroots organizing strategy, it also heralded the emergence of a new, young leader with a growing national profile who would bring widespread attention to the freedom struggle. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), an eloquent and staunch advocate of nonviolent protest, had been chosen as the boycott’s leader. Dr. King’s presence on national television gave him unprecedented exposure and marked the critical role that this new medium would play in shaping the course of the movement.

  Television could bring the ugly reality of segregation right into people’s homes, and it offered civil rights activists engaged in the domestic battle for hearts and minds a powerful new tool. The rise of television, in fact, happened concurrently with the beginning of the civil rights movement. Years later, one of the era’s most celebrated activists, Congressman John Lewis (b. 1940), reflected on the importance of the media to the movement’s success. “If it hadn’t been for the media—the print media and television—the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings, a choir without a song.”35

  Buoyed by the success in Montgomery, Ella Baker and others pushed for more direct action. Over the years, Baker had continued her work with the NAACP, although she resigned from her national post as director of branches in 1946. For a time her focus turned more local, and while living in Harlem in 1952, she was elected president of the New York City NAACP, the first woman to hold this position. “Her new post,” wrote her biographer Barbara Ransby, “provided her with the latitude and authority to orchestrate some of the kinds of political campaigns she had long envisioned.”36

  Baker was in her late 50s, and she had grown disillusioned with the cautious approach of the leaders of her generation, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr. She became frustrated with the hierarchical setup of the preeminent civil rights organizations; and legal strategies and speeches, she believed, were not advancing the movement quickly or dramatically enough. It would be young college students, committed to nonviolence and willing to risk everything—including the disapproval of their more cautious parents—who would pick up where the Montgomery bus boycott had left off. These were the children of a generation that did not speak up. John Lewis said his own parents, sharecroppers in Pike County, Alabama, didn’t have time to fight for what was “right” or “wrong”; their struggle to survive on a daily basis was a daunting enough prospect.37

  As early as 1943, there had been sit-ins. What started as relatively isolated events in cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Baltimore showed the first signs of being a movement by the late ’50s, when students began to stage sit-ins in southern cities.38 No one took much notice until February 1, 1960, when four African American students—Joseph McNeil (b. 1942), Franklin McCain (b. 1941), Ezell Blair, Jr. (b. 1941), and David Richmond (1941–1990)—sat down at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were refused service, but they remained. For days the protest grew; each day more students and their supporters poured into Woolworth’s. And so did their opponents. Pelted with food and lighted cigarette butts and humiliating racial slurs, the African American students responded nonviolently. Northern white students began to join their cause as well. The sit-in movement spread to cities throughout the South. It would be the end of July before Woolworth’s finally crumbled to pressure and desegregated its lunch counters.

  Baker was inspired by this powerful act of civil disobedience, and she encouraged young people to form their own organizations rather than be drawn into the older, more established ones trying to recruit them, such as the NAACP, CORE, and the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), of which Baker herself was a cofounder. She did not want to see the quietly rebellious energy of the sit-ins quashed, for she felt that it was this sort of act that would draw the most withering attention to the injustice of segregation, and which held the most potential to effect change. It was young people, with their “brazen fighting spirit,” who became the movement’s foot soldiers under Baker’s guidance.39

  In an attempt to harness the momentum of the sit-in movement, Baker organized a meeting of student activists from around the country at her alma mater, Shaw University in North Carolina, over Easter weekend, 1960. Diane Nash (b. 1938) attended this event, where a new organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was born. Nash was an instant Baker acolyte. “No one was more impressed by Baker’s message and the compelling image that she projected than Diane Nash,” wrote Baker’s biographer.40

  As a native of Chicago, Nash admitted to feeling “naïve” when she first came face to face with segregation in the South as a student at Fisk University in Tennessee, the alma mater of W. E. B. Du Bois. “The first time she encountered segregation, really encountered it, was when she attended the Tennessee State Fair soon after arriving. There she saw the ‘white’ and ‘colored’ signs on the restroom doors. When she asked about it, the other students shrugged and told her that that was just the way the world worked.”41 That indignity, coupled with the inspiration of what other students were doing around the country, had led Nash to become a leader of the Nashville Student Movement in 1959. She and her fellow students, John Lewis among them, began staging sit-ins and other direct actions that aroused sympathy in the North and vitriol in the South. In fact, the first stage of Nashville’s movement began just 12 days after the Greensboro sit-in, on February 13, 1960, and ended three months later when Nashville became the first southern city to desegregate its lunch counters, more than two months ahead of Woolworth’s corporate decision.

  Even as boycotts and sit-ins challenged the racist status quo, many African Americans were unsatisfied with the pace of progress. Sit-ins were direct, democratic, effective—and illegal. Students who participated in them were objects of violence and scorn. While it was undeniable that they entered the civil rights battle at tremendous risk to themselves, for some it was not enough. Many young African Americans turned to leaders who rejected nonviolent resistance entirely, including advocates of armed self-defense—like Robert F. Williams (1925–1996) and the Deacons of Defense—or radical voices like Detroit’s fiery Reverend Albert Cleage, Jr. (1911–2000).

  But no one channeled the currents of black anger and frustration with more power and eloquence than Malcolm X (1925–1965) of the Nation of Islam. The sensationalist documentary The Hate That Hate Produced introduced Malcolm to a national audience. “You cannot find one black man—I don’t care who he is,” Malcolm said to the young news correspondent Mike Wallace, “who has not been personally damaged in some way by the devilish acts of the collective white man.”42


  Unlike other prominent black activists at the time, Malcolm X scorned integration. He expressed a deep anger that simmered in many African Americans, but which they dared not display openly. Malcolm’s radical message resonated in the urban ghettos of the North and on the West Coast. But it also angered people, black and white, who believed that he offered no constructive plan for reshaping society and who feared that his vocalized militancy would scare away potential white allies.

  Malcolm X, by Ed Ford. New York World Telegram & Sun, 1964. Photograph. Library of Congress.

  Malcolm’s radicalism may not have been universally embraced, but it was emblematic of the diversity of opinions among African Americans about how best to achieve racial justice and equality. He voiced the widespread impatience with the scope and pace of change that extended well beyond the radical margins of black opinion. By 1963, when Ebony marked the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, even the resolutely upbeat magazine reflected this frustration in its editorial: “In this 100th year of de jure freedom, today’s Negro is not too impressed with how far he has come from bondage.”43

  A mood of protest swept the country, igniting what the media called the “Negro Revolt of 1963.” That year’s “epidemic of militant action”—so described by the radical Detroit minister the Reverend Albert Cleage—culminated in two massive demonstrations, which showed that African Americans in both the North and South were not going to give up until they achieved true equality.44

  The first took place in Detroit on June 23, 1963, when an estimated 200,000 people gathered for the Walk for Freedom. Less than two weeks prior, on June 12, Medgar Evers (1925–1963), a civil rights activist and Mississippi’s first NAACP field secretary, was assassinated in his own driveway by a white segregationist, Byron De La Beckwith. (It would be 31 years before a jury would convict him of first-degree murder.) Evers’s death loomed large over the march, and demonstrators of all leanings carried signs memorializing him.45

  Twenty years after the wartime riot that had broken out in Belle Isle, advocates of nonviolence and integration marched in the Detroit streets side by side with champions of black nationalism, self-defense, and revolution in an extraordinary display of solidarity across ideological differences. The radical activist Grace Lee Boggs (b. 1915), who for many years aligned herself with Malcolm X, was one of the organizers of the march; Judge Damon Keith, who was in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s camp, had a seat on the podium during King’s closing address. Boggs and Keith occupied very different positions in the civil rights movement, but the participation of each was emblematic of the march’s goal of unity within the black community. Money raised by organizers went to the SCLC, to be used for continuing civil rights organizing in the South. The NAACP, initially reluctant, endorsed the march, as did the AFL-CIO and local Democratic Party affiliates. Detroit claimed at least partial ownership of the march, with Mayor Jerry Cavanagh putting forth his city, which had so often seethed with racism and brutality, as one that was home to progress in race relations. The Reverend Cleage, one of the march’s organizers, said in a speech that day, “Negroes are discriminated against on every hand, right here in Detroit….? We must FIGHT and FIGHT and FIGHT.”46

  Cleage expected little to nothing from white America. What he wanted from the march was black solidarity. He had first come to prominence in Detroit in 1961, when he began to publish the Illustrated News, a paper that promoted black self-defense and stood in sharp contrast in tone to Detroit’s other three black weeklies. He raged against police brutality and workplace and educational inequality, and was no supporter of integration. A forceful presence in his native Detroit, Cleage garnered widespread attention across the nation with his Black Christian Nationalist Movement, formed in 1967.

  Even in religion, Cleage railed, blacks were dominated by whites. This had to end. “For him there was no better example of the enduring myth of black inferiority than biblical images,” wrote the historian Peniel Joseph. “White supremacy was so powerful that even the religious figures blacks looked to for eternal salvation were white.”47 On Easter 1967, Cleage unveiled his Black Madonna, an 18-foot-tall painting depicting a black Mary and Jesus that would give Cleage’s Central Congregational Church its new name, the Shrine of the Black Madonna. For Cleage, this was the culmination of years of adherence to a philosophy that was considered too dangerous by the more moderate leaders of the civil rights movement.

  On that day in 1963, though, powerful voices from all corners of the civil rights arena were heard. The march ended with a rousing speech by King, in which he implored African Americans to wait no longer for equality, although in far less inflammatory terms than Cleage. “Gradualism is little more than escapism and do-nothingism, which ends up in stand-stillism,” Dr. King said, addressing those who were still arguing for a gradual approach. “We want all of our rights, and we want them here, and we want them now.” Yes, demands needed to be made and heard, but, King reminded the audience, nonviolence was still key: “Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy.”48 While followers of Martin and Malcolm might march side by side, on this point of nonviolence they remained divided.

  At the end of the day, King won over even more people to the cause, including one of the city’s most apolitical African American businesspeople: the founder of Motown Records, Berry Gordy (b. 1929). Gordy touted his company as “The Sound of Young America,” and Gordy’s Young America was in no way political. Motown artists like Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross and the Supremes crossed over to white audiences and defined the sound of an era. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, message—that segregation hurt both black and white Americans—was right in line with Gordy’s crossover music strategy. In his autobiography, To Be Loved, Gordy wrote, “I saw Motown much like the world Dr. King was fighting for, with people of different races and religions, working together harmoniously for a common goal.”49 Gordy released a commemorative LP of King’s Detroit speech, titled The Great March to Freedom, to coincide with King’s landmark appearance at the March on Washington later that summer.

  Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Washington Temple Church, Brooklyn, by O. Fernandez. New York World Telegram & Sun, 1962. Photograph. Library of Congress.

  In August 1963, 250,000 people gathered in the nation’s capital for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, overshadowing the Walk for Freedom in the public’s conscience. It was here that King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, his message ringing out for all to hear: “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”50

  While a quarter of a million participated, millions more witnessed the March on Washington on television. The grassroots organizers of the civil rights movement were being helped tremendously by the broadcasting of these events on television. In The New York Times, the television critic Jack Gould wrote: “The medium of television is proving an indispensable force in the Negro’s pursuit of human rights…. The gentle entrance and exit of so much petitioning humanity was an editorial in movement. Its eloquence could not be the same in only frozen word or stilled picture.”51 The March on Washington inspired solidarity demonstrations all over the world—from James Baldwin’s symbolic walk to the American Embassy in Paris before the event, to marches that day in capitals from Oslo to Cairo. In Ghana, marchers carried signs that said, “America, Africa is watching you.”52

  In a strange twist of fate, one person who wasn’t watching was W. E. B. Du Bois. The pioneer in the campaign to bring the shame of American race relations before the world died in Ghana on the night before the March on Washington, effectively passing the mantle to King.

  THE IMPACT OF THESE DEMONSTRATIONS WAS FELT IN EVERY ECHELON OF AMERICAN SOCIETY. The passage of the landmark Civil Rights Acts of 196
4 and 1965 soon thereafter, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender, represented the culmination of decades of activism for integration and racial equality. Even the Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who was no fan of King and who used all kinds of threats to discourage King from protests he felt would embarrass him or hinder his efforts in Congress, showed great leadership in seeing that this legislation was passed.

  Despite all the protests and marches and passage of the Civil Rights Acts, in 1965 most African Americans were still barred from voting in the nation’s southern states. John Lewis and other student activists took the campaign for voting rights to Selma, Alabama, where African Americans made up the majority of the population, but accounted for a mere 1 percent of registered voters. That year, Lewis, as the leader of SNCC, planned a march from Selma to the state capitol building in Montgomery to call attention to black voting rights and register voters in Alabama. As a young man, Lewis had been drawn to the movement after hearing Martin Luther King, Jr., on the radio, and had been deeply touched when King sponsored him to come visit him in Atlanta.

  Lewis, himself a native of Alabama, and local ministers invited their idol, King, to join the Selma campaign. But when 600 demonstrators met at Brown Chapel Church on March 7 to begin their protest march, King was not among them. Undeterred, Lewis led the protesters from the church. When they made it to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were met by armed state troopers sent by Alabama’s governor, George Wallace. Also waiting at the river’s edge that day were television cameras, documenting the events as they unfolded.